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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of the Internet

Refusing to be a slave to spaghetti western titles, I begin with the bad. Herman Wallace died. Freed from prison at age 71 for a bad trial for a crime he denied, after spending 41 years in solitary confinement, Herman Wallace succumbed to cancer the day after his release.

The Good comes from Jeff Gamso and Rick Horowitz, both of whom addressed how such a thing could have happened to Herman Wallace. From Gamso:

But this isn’t just a story of love and warmth. It’s not just a feel-good tale of redemption. This is a story to piss you off. As much as it’s the story of Herman Wallace, it’s also the story of Inspector Javert District Attorney Sam D’Aquilla. Who had urged the warden to keep Wallace in prison after Judge Jackson ordered his release. And who obtained a new indictment against him Thursday afternoon, again charging him with Miller’s murder.

While Wallace lay dying, D’Aquilla represented the murder charge to the grand jury. He was certain that Wallace was a murderer. Maybe he will try the dead body just to be sure.

Horowitz picked up on D’Aquilla’s justification for his hatred.

Those are the words of ironic self-indictment from the following quote in Gamso’s blog post:

When asked whether D’Aquilla considered the value of expending resources on a case that likely would never see Wallace’s return to jail, D’Aquilla said he had.

“I actually determined that he was sentenced to life and he didn’t fulfill his sentence,” he said. “It’s not fair to have him not in jail. His medical condition or something like that didn’t nullify the actions that he did.”

He added, “I’m a prosecutor. This is what we do.”

Yes, he was indeed a prosecutor. And playing God with other people’s lives is what they do. Rather than waste any more of your time here, I strongly urge you to read Jeff’s and Rick’s posts.

You’re looking a guy who is far from rich who has no contacts with the kind of attorney that he needs.

If he did have the name of a competent firm, their first response would probably be: “Write us a retainer check for $50,000 and we’ll get right on it.”

And these aren’t the uneducated mopes who manage to figure out what to do by the tens of thousands when the Po-Po come knocking, but the smart ones. Nice to know that we’re racking up those $50 grand checks every time the phone rings.

And yet, these weren’t the worst comments to appear on that post. Another one, which never saw the light of day, exposes a different sort of problem. Scan it just for fun, and ponder whether the lawprof blogs or the marketing blogs would have posted it because of all the nice things it had to say.

Even an experienced|thorough|dedicated|devoted editor with excellent|corrected|reliable vision could never coherently|correctly|thoroughly|adequately review the confusing|frustrating|mystifying writings|ramblings|mishegas shown above. Sorry.

Heh, in case anybody is wondering what manner of crazy this is, it looks like somebody’s blog comment spambot dumped its source file. I think it was supposed to pick a random paragraph, and then randomly choose one option from each of those presented in each pair of braces. So “{I have|I’ve} been {ѕurfing|brοwsіng} online more than {three|3|2|4} hours todаy, уеt Ι neveг founԁ any interesting aгticle like yоurs.” should become something like “I’ve been ѕurfing online more than 2 hours todаy, уеt Ι neveг founԁ any interesting aгticle like yоurs.” and so on. The resulting paragraph was supposed to be posted as a comment. I’m guessing that a syntax error kept the spambot from being able to find the random choice sections, so it just spit out the whole thing.

Scott H. Greenfield

What Do You Think?

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SHG